On Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:26:14 -0400 "Christopher Morrow" <christopher.morrow@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/19/07, John C. A. Bambenek <bambenek@gmail.com> wrote:
I love how the framed it as "data discrimination". Let's just be honest... 99% of it was illegal traffic taking up far more than their fair share of bandwidth.
is there really anyway to really know how much of it was legit/legal/illegal??
Nope. And BitTorrent is trying to be very legit; see, for example, http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2007/10/08/brightcove-fox-paramount-te... Besides, legal issues should be dealt with by the legal process. If nothing else, there one has guarantees of due process and the right to contest the charges.
Also, I'll channel Sean Donelan now: "ISP's... damned if they do, damned if they don't" It's a funny world out there :)
(also, how is it that Comcast is getting dinged on this but BT or other carreirs doing similar 'rate shaping' for p2p traffic are NOT?)
Personally, I see a big difference between rate-shaping and sending RSTs. (I suppose you could view RSTs as allocating 0 bps, but that's not a helpful distinction.) That said, I don't approve of other carriers sending RSTs, either; I simply happened to see the articles on Comcast today. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
Personally, I see a big difference between rate-shaping and sending RSTs. (I suppose you could view RSTs as allocating 0 bps, but that's not a helpful distinction.)
I see a big difference as well. With rate-shaping they would need to have the P2P identification widget in-line with the data path to be able to classify and mark traffic so that it can be queued/throttled appropriately. This means that overall network availability would now be tied to a device that isn't really a proven piece of network hardware. To send TCP resets, on the other hand, all that is needed is a span session to the inspection probe to let it determine which connections to shutdown and issue the resets completely out of band. If the inspection probe kacks, everything on the network continues to function and only the P2P throttling functionality would be impacted. As a network engineer focused on availability, I have a very clear preference in implementation. -Eric
participants (2)
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Eric Spaeth -
Steven M. Bellovin